Spain: Mercadona customers no longer required to weigh fruit and veg

Mercadona customers will no longer be required to weight and label their fruit and vegetables. The retailer owned by Juan Roig has been introducing its new generation stores where the weighing and labelling of fruit and vegetables is done on the till. Most supermarket chains have found that when the customers weight their own fruit and vegetables there is a risk of fraud. In fact, Mercadona was one of the few stores that kept the system in place, as most supermarket chains have suffered fraud with the weighing of fruit.

However, the Valencian retailer assures that the reason for the change is not consumer fraud, but the desire to speed up the purchasing process and make it more efficient. Company spokespersons explain that check-out assistants are much faster in this process than customers. Moreover, when the bags or labels run out, consumers suffered delays.

The problem of fraud in the weighing of fruits and vegetables has just been addressed at a security congress organised by the employers' association Aecoc a few weeks ago in Madrid. It is one of the issues that contribute to unidentified losses, although sources from Mercadona explain that the losses recorded as a result of this form of fraud "are not significant."